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The conflict in Iraq started a century ago. One hundred years ago on Saturday, to be exact. So did the civil war in Syria. Along with Russia’s dismemberment of Ukraine. The bloody collapse of Yugoslavia. The disastrous Soviet experiment. And the enduring fight between Israelis and Palestinians.

All of these conflicts, and much more, grew out of World War I.

At the turn of the 20th century Europeans expected to live the good life in what they called La Belle Epoque. Countries were industrializing, economies were expanding, trade was growing, empires were loosening.

Then Serbian terrorist Gavrilo Princip fired two shots, lighting the fuse to a global conflagration, leaving death, destruction, poverty, misery, and tyranny in its wake. We continue to pay the price for perhaps the most effective act of state terrorism in human history. Yet on the hundredth anniversary of this horrific moment Bosnian Serbs erected statues, unveiled mosaics, and held banquets for the man who destroyed much of the modern world.

The 1800s were a time of conflict. Early the next century, however, all of the major powers were enjoying the benefits of peace, despite periodic eruptions in the Balkans. Globalizing markets spread prosperity. Optimists spoke of the economic impossibility of war. Socialists predicted that the working class would unite across national boundaries to prevent conflict. The empires of Austro-Hungary, Germany, and Russia seemed ready for liberal, democratic reform.

But on June 28, 1914 19-year-old Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip shot Franz Ferdinand, heir to the ramshackle Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife Sophie. The crime resembled a comic-opera, with imperial authorities and Serbian conspirators matching each other in flamboyant incompetence. But Franz Ferdinand’s handlers made the final mistake, as the royal couple ended up in a stopped car in front of Princip.

Princip targeted Ferdinand because the latter intended to improve the status of the Slavic peoples in a polyglot state dominated by Austrian and Hungarian elites. If Ferdinand had succeeded, Princip’s hope for an expanded Serbian nation would have been for naught. Croats and Muslims had no sympathy for the conspirators. After the assassination anti-Serb rioting engulfed Sarajevo. However, the damage was done. Death warrants for some 17 million people across the continent and around the world were signed in Ferdinand’s blood.

The fuse was long between the murders and the war. The intervening weeks were filled with ultimatums, threats, plans, conversations, alternatives, mobilizations, and pleas. No one truly desired war. However, otherwise decent human beings appeared at their most stupid while holding Europe’s future in their hands.

Fear caused statesmen to make reckless demands. Hubris caused leaders to assume others would give way. Despair caused officials to surrender to circumstances. Even after government belatedly recognized the danger they found that “control has been lost and the stone has begun to roll,” as German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg haplessly put it, and roll unstoppably. Statesmen finally shocked into action to maintain peace were told it was too late: the massive war machines had no brakes, the mobilization plans would accept no delay. Many leaders came to believe war to be inevitable, and that if it was going to come, it might as well come then. Crowds cheered as soldiers mobilized and marched off to war.

The conflict was unforgivably reckless, myopic, and stupid. Contrary to the history written by the victors, blame was widely shared.

Great Britain enjoys the best reputation because it was on the winning side and, equally important, ran the war’s most brilliant PR operation. While the British could claim the most liberal state, despite their vast colonial holdings, Germany’s franchise was in fact broader. Wilhelmine Germany, too, was a constitutional state bounded by law, despite its flawed political structure. Its colonial holdings were much smaller due to its much later start.

Belgium looked to be the most innocent, but actually was the most murderous to people outside of its borders: millions of Africans died in the Belgian Congo, perhaps the most mal-governed of all European colonies. France, also a colonial empire, was a revenge-minded democracy, determined to seize back territory lost four decades previously—which centuries before had been stolen from defeated German states. Paris shared Berlin’s lack of moral scruples about war but was more concerned about international, and especially British, opinion. Austro-Hungary was less democratic, but the empire’s complicated governing structure contained important checks and balances within.

Also a member of the Entente was the anti-Semitic despotism of the Tsar. Grotesquely inefficient with occasional liberal impulses, it was an embarrassment to the “war for democracy.” Far worse was its small protégé, Serbia, which staged the act of state terrorism against Austro-Hungary. Serbian Military Intelligence targeted Ferdinand and armed the wannabe assassins, including Princip.

On the side of the Central Powers was the Ottoman Empire, sclerotic, incompetent, and authoritarian. Of lesser note was Bulgaria, which completed the Quadruple Alliance, and Romania and Italy, which joined the Entente. The latter was democratic, but motivated by booty rather than principle. Rome joined the conflict only after being promised territory from the Austrian-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. With its eyes on German territories in the Pacific, Japan also joined the Entente.

The best that could be said of this disreputable menagerie of combatants was that the U.S. had nothing at stake which warranted associating with any of them. Washington should have let the great and not-so-great imperial powers battle it out over whatever it was that divided them. Certainly not democracy or militarism. Both sides had some of the former and too much of the latter. Certainly not human liberty and dignity. The records of both sides were mixed, to say the least. The war resulted from a toxic mix of nationalistic excess, territorial ambition, and nightmarish fears.

Unfortunately, America’s president, the haughty, sanctimonious, and egotistical—even monomaniacal—Woodrow Wilson imagined himself as God’s anointed to bring peace to the earth, and that required America to become a belligerent. Wilson also was outraged when Germany employed a new weapon, the submarine, against British shipping. However, Berlin had little choice, since London armed its passenger liners, filled their holds with ammunition, and ordered the ships to ram submarines which surfaced to verify the vessel’s civilian status. For instance, the famed Lusitania mixed bullets with babies, and sank as a result of the secondary explosion of the munitions carried below.